My personal jihad

Now I'm getting seriously annoyed. It starts as an invisible enemy, and by the time you see it, it's too late. Mold.

I have spent a good part of this year fighting the battle that this building is unsafe for research purposes. The biggest reason is the fresh air intakes of this building that supposedly provides half the ventilation for this building. I can tell if it's raining outside without looking out a window because I SMELL the moisture in the rooms.

And every time it rains, we start growing out mold in our tissue cultures. But it's so abundant now, that even on days when there's no rain, we're having trouble. This is the most maddening part - I could be in the culture room setting up two dishes for incubation. Dish A and dish B are setup using the same media, sterilized instruments, and equipment. The only difference is that when the cover for dish A is open, dish B is closed. Yet, dish B will go moldy but dish A will stay clean.

This doesn't even mention that I'm very allergic to mold! I've even tried the occupational health approach, only to be told there's nothing that can be done.

I'm getting sick and tired of losing cultures that I spend hours setting up. I'm fed up with if there's rain coming, you can't be setting up cultures because they will ALL go moldy. I'm fed up with these bozos that allowed for mold to grow on the buildings filters then say "sorry, we can't do anything now except change the filters".

The question that needs to be answered now is, how do you wage war against an invisible enemy?